IT Pros Find Lack of FireWire on MacBooks Disturbing

Sleek, sexy and silver, Apple’s new MacBook may be a consumer’s dream machine. But to some information-technology professionals, its lack of FireWire makes it look like a nightmare.

"I’ve been fixing Macs for 15 years, and this to me is just a big middle finger in the face for us Mac guys," said Tom
Koch, the owner of Omnitech, a Mac repair service.

Despite the slew of positive reviews for the aluminum MacBook, many potential users are complaining about Apple’s peculiar omission of FireWire connectivity from the device. (The higher-end MacBook Pro has a FireWire 800 port, but the cheaper MacBook does not.) The removed feature is an annoyance to consumers who have FireWire devices — like external hard drives or camcorders — that they’d like to connect to their MacBooks. But the port’s absence is a grave concern to some IT
professionals who say corrupt MacBooks will be difficult to troubleshoot without it.

Specifically, the problem is that the new MacBooks are unable to start up in FireWire Target Disk Mode, which enables users to connect to the computer from another Mac, turning the target computer into an external drive. That’s especially useful for diagnosing problems when the targeted computer won’t even run. Without Target Disk Mode, the only alternative for troubleshooting a corrupt MacBook is to physically remove the drive, which increases the risk of losing information, said Koch. It’s also more time and trouble.

"I work in a large school district that doesn’t like Macs," wrote Russ Tolman, an IT professional, in Apple’s support forum. "One thing that has allowed us to keep them has been the ability to image them with FireWire Ports. Also, the ability to diagnose and fix problems using Target Disk Mode. Would love to hear how I am going to do that now…. Schools without much money will be moving to cheap PCs."

Concerns over the death of FireWire on the new MacBooks surfaced before Apple even announced them. Early, leaked spy photos of the notebook’s case gave away that the port was gone — a surprising move, because Apple created the FireWire interface in 1995. By 2003, the
FireWire interface was on almost every computer machine. Consumers generally use FireWire to connect devices requiring high-speed data transfers, such as camcorders and hard drives — another area of concern in regard to the new MacBook.

The lack of FireWire may trouble MacBook owners in other ways, too. If, for example, you backed up your data on an external hard drive and your
MacBook crashed, you’d no longer have FireWire to easily restore that information using Apple’s Time Machine recovery service. Instead, you’ll have to transfer the information by USB — which is not friendly with Time Machine, Koch notes: Sometimes the backup application doesn’t recognize USB drives, among other issues.

Also, customers looking to upgrade from their old Mac to the new
MacBook won’t have FireWire to seamlessly copy over their data from one machine to the other. Instead, they’ll have to perform this migration over an ethernet cable, which is "a drag" as some files often get lost, said James Galbraith, Macworld’s Lab Director.

It remains unclear why Apple removed FireWire from the popular MacBook. One sliver of potential insight into the removal comes from a screen capture of a purported e-mail exchange between Steve Jobs and a customer. In the message, the customer complains he can no longer recommend MacBooks to his friends, because the notebook’s lack of
FireWire breaks compatibility with camcorders. In response, Jobs points out that most new camcorders are compatible with USB.